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Anatole Kaletsky is Chief Economist and Co-Chairman of Gavekal Dragonomics. A former columnist at the Times of London, the International New York Times and the Financial Times, he is the author of Capitalism 4.0, The Birth of a New Economy, which anticipated many of the post-crisis transformations of the global economy. His 1985 book, Costs of Default, became an influential primer for Latin American and Asian governments negotiating debt defaults and restructurings with banks and the IMF.

"Suppose that, in the meantime, the EU continues its economic recovery"

And that is going to happen because? (multipe choice question - take your pick of answers!)
(a) The EU is an agile and flexible organisation that can react swiftly to crises caused by globalisation?
(b) Automation over the next few years is not going to take away millions of jobs across Europe, leaving countries that have attracted large numbers of migrant workers with dirty great benefits liabilities for non-nationals?
(c) The EU countries' politicians are not terrified of facing their own populations and will open the pandora's box of referenda across countries so that they can drive through treaty change to enact reforms?
(d) Pigs might learn to fly?

By next June general election win, Theresa May will no longer be an unelected official. That will boost her political leverage and will confine the opposition at home to the kid's dinner table. She is getting her license to kill in plain sight and nobody is paying attention. Awesome.

I easily figure out Mrs May replicating that iconic Churchill's "holding the line" spirit of WWII.

In as much I can figure out the 26 headed obese European beast getting lost in the dungeons and ultimately squandering its already emaciated dignity.

EU will fold big and it will lose much more than the UK in the process.

Action is now, and she is clearly picking up the gauntlet.
Who cares 2022 ?

Anatole Kaletsky makes an interesting point, saying even if Theresa May wins the upcoming snap election, it will be a "Pyrrhic victory" for her, because she surely will lose big in 2022, if not sooner. Last year May said there wouldn't be any election until 2020. She changed her mind, claiming Britain needed "certainty, stability and strong leadership" following the EU referendum.
By holding election this year, "May has effectively extended the deadline for Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union from 2019 until 2022," after triggering Article 50 in March that gives two years of negotiating Brexit. The author says an early election means Britain will have to "formally leave the EU in March 2019," because May will no longer face any pressure from voters and the Parliament. "But it also allows Britain to accept a long transition period after the 2019 departure deadline." This is the first advantage.
The problem is that even if the business world and "administrative systems" have been clamouring for a transition period to be "as long as possible" that allows them to adjust themselves, Conservative Euroskeptics insist on "a complete and immediate break with the EU." The author explains even if Britain will be out of the EU by March 2019, "very little will change in Britain’s economy or way of life by the time of the next general election in 2022." Nevertheless it's still too early to predict what our interconnected world is going to be like in 2019.
The author points out this snap election may be "a setback for extreme Euroskeptics, who might otherwise have forced her to break completely with Europe by March 2019." Besides the opposition would be much better equipped to beat the Tories, especially the English nationalists, come 2022. As weak as Labour is under the leftist leader, Jeremy Corbyn, many predict a devastating defeat for the party, forcing - most likely - Corbyn to resign, allowing it a new start.
The author sees a "realignment of progressive British politics," that will inspire "disillusioned" Labour politicians and voters to join forces with "Liberal Democrats, Greens, and perhaps Scottish and Welsh nationalists." A new and strong opposition made up of pro-EU centrist forces "could still snatch victory from the jaws of defeat." In other words this election will "delay economic changes," it will also "greatly accelerate the transformation of British politics."
According to the author, British Euroskeptics may triumph for now, but they will merely win a "pyrrhic victory." Let's hope that the author's optimism isn't too premature. But he bases his prediction on past experience. By 2022 "the Conservatives will have been in power for three parliaments and 12 years." History tells "that is about how long it has typically taken Britain’s political pendulum to swing between right and left."
The author sees the 2022 election as a bellwether for the country's strength, as "the full consequences of terminating EU membership come into view." Depending on the results of the negotiations, voters may want an end of May's leadership, if she fails to strike good trade deals with China, the US and other major economies. If economy in the EU thrives and the Franco-German axis turns to the right direction, many Britons may want to rejoin the EU, especially when the "two-speed" Europe becomes reality.
So "the decisive battle in the war for Britain’s long-term future will not be this year’s easy victory for May. It will be the clash, five years from now, between nationalist conservatism and a new outward-looking progressive opposition." There's a saying, "He who laughs last, laughs best." Indeed, we all need to be realistic and take one step at a time. Remember, 2022 is five years away, and much can happen in between. But supporters of remaining in the EU should fight for what they believe in. Without conviction, nothing can be achieved.

Eric. since when has the EU bothered with such trifles, for example ignoring referendum results that do not suit them such as the Irish and the Dutch. They will simply issue a memorandum extending extension of contract and claim special circumstances; providing of course it suits them. A hard Brexit, in fact an anytime Brexit, or a Full English Brexit with a side order of toast, has implications for the EU also even if it is a 2 way street with priority given in one direction. I can see right now David Davies walking down the steps of a plane just in from Munich waving a memorandum of misunderstanding

I remain astounded at the way the UK debate ignores clear facts. Article 50 was triggered in march 2017; so from April 2019 on,the UK will no longer be a EU member. Every EU authority and EU state will be legally obliged by EU law to treat all UK firms and citizens as "non-EU", until such a time as new treaties create new "special relationships" on trade, finance, citizen's rights, and all other items now covered by the EU treaty. Everyone knows that such a treaty or treaties, which need to be negotiated, signed, and ratified by each of the 27 EU states can never enter into force until far later than 2019; even 5 years from 2017 is usually considered to be "very fast".

That has huge consequences. UK citizens will need residence permits to live in the EU, work permits to work there. As restricting immigration is the key motive for leaving the EU, can one expect EU leniency towards UK citizens? Material goods will pay the full EU duties for "non-EU countries"; many "services", financial (like the City) and others, will no longer be allowed.

There is no way that could be "softened", even if the EU authorities would like that, as that would require the UK to be treated differently from other non-EU countries, without a corresponding treaty . That is illegal under EU law. Other non-EU countries could immediately challenge any such "favouritism to the UK" in the EU courts. In addition, such "softness to the UK" has no chance of being politically acceptable.

So the hard core Conservatives will get their choice: A diamond-hard Brexit in March 2019. They, and everyone else, will suffer. Might it not be worth while asking the EU kindly if the UK could be allowed to stay?

Ted Smith wrote "Not if sanity prevails and those arrangements are extended by mutual agreement for 5-7 years until a new FTA is inked."
Regretfully, however sane it may be, that is legally impossible. The UK can make as many "sane" proposals as it wishes, but the EU has no procedure for "mutual sane agreement". Even if all parties are willing, that cannot lead to legally binding agreements that will stand up in court. Only a proper treaty, signed by UK and EU, and ratified by all 27 EU members, has legal standing. That process willonly be done for the full "Brexit agreement", and not for individual "sane policy snippets".

Anyone who advocates increases in taxes whether direct or indirect, increases in costs of living, etc...on the population during these austere and very difficult times, needs to have a reality check or seek urgent medical help.

I thought you want more benefits for people like you. But you nobly refuse others to be taxed, and you do not want foreigners/immigrants around creating incremental GDP either. Where do you think your increase in living standards is coming from?

By internationalist and progressive forces, I take it that Kaletsky means the laughable trotskyist Corbyn. It may be that May would have been better off to scheme to keep the little uneducated fool as leader of the socialist party for her own peace of mind, although in my opinion taking the political profit now shows good, hard headed sense and will help the UK to have some chance against the dictators of Brussels. I say this as a remain voter.

" It is identification with Crown, Parliament, Law Courts, and everything that flows from that."
These are three foundations of Britishness which are currently deeply insecure I would say.
The monarchy represents the pinnacle of inherited wealth and its vastly inequitable distribution. Definitely a mixed blessing and of increasingly questionable economic value. I wouldn't wish to have to call the result of a referendum vote on its being dismantled. The sentimental attachment to Elizabeth, who has widely been regarded as 'a good thing' may dissipate quickly when the controversial Charles takes the throne.
Parliament has been in disarray for years and is increasingly distrusted to hold the government (a small cabal based in Downing Street) to proper account. Cash for questions, peerages for political donations, the expenses scandal have all undermined faith in the 'Mother of Parliaments' and led many to see it as an archaic institution better serving its members than the population of the country it purports to serve. Those who respect their own elected member increasingly regard the rest as self serving opportunists.
And the legal system is a shambles. Access to legal redress is increasingly beyond the means of the majority of the population and faith in its impartiality is at a low ebb. The widespread (and not unjustified) belief that who pays the best legal team is most likely to win in court makes justice a mockery. If Law does not yield Justice as its product it has ceased to serve its purpose. And as the saying goes ' justice must not only be done it must be seen to done'.
A three legged stool with three wobbly legs.

A worrisome dictatorial feature of EU unelected clerks is their utter rejection of system change (currency, borders, etc.).

By means of observation, the UK has cleverly realized that by the very next mild crisis, Italy, Spain and Portugal may follow Greece in its populist drowning, if not something worse. The EU becoming then a sinking boat, an early UK leave may prove prescient in the end.

Have you thought about if you have it all wrong? That maybe the three you mentioned are drowning regardless for no fault but their own corrupt leaders and stupid and lazy populace? ANd that maybe the EU has managed to extend the agony but no one can keep them alive? Name me three things that could make these countries great or be cause for optimism and explain how the EU is preventing them from realizing their potential.

The last time Britain went on the offensive against a Europe united against her led to the death of Sir John Moore and the humiliating ejection at Corunna of his army from Europe bag and baggage. His successor and Theresa May's predecessor, the future Lord Wellington, cannily spent the next six years avoiding any sort of fight he might lose so that he could conserve his forces for the final victory at Waterloo. I don't see in Mrs May the same aversion to un-necessary and wounding skirmishes, either with foes or or with 'family' and potential friends.

Just drop all the stupidity and wasted government time and stay in the EU. The British have currently gone bonkers, although I note that a recent poll shows the 4% difference at the referendum now reversed... .

A lot of assumptions, including the EU changing itself to better suit the needs of Europe and the Euro staying the course despite the misery it is bringing to poorer EU nations. I think the EU will be surprised how the UK gets on without them. The UK is not just another Member of the EU....whilst Junker and Co like to position the UK as 1/28th of the EU the truth is that the UK is actually 20% of the budget. In addition to that the UK has invested £half a trillion pounds into the EU accelerating the growth and size had the UK not contributed. The EU is an ungrateful arrogant structure, dismissive of the rights and democratic basis of free European states. No one in the UK was ever asked if they were prepared to sell themselves into EU servitude ... A fatal political error made by intellectually weak politicians nationally and in the EU, many in the inow understood the strategy of the EU to enhtangle and trap the Europeans into a maelstrom of obligations, connections and treaties that made freeing ourselves almost impossible. The UK understood the strategy, refused to join the Euro and Shengen and Merkels disasterous open door migrant policy did the rest...after forty years of subsuidising failure the British stated they had had enough....enough of being exploited, enough social dumping, enough red tape, enough legal interference, enough incompetent fiscal management, enough micro managing from Brussels, enough failed economic growth, enough lies and blackmail, enough failed teade deals.....ENOUGH! The liberal left have been a complete and total disaster. They are not outward looking, they are protectionist, inward looking wealthy champagne socialists, who have no real ideas how to drive economic growth, and certainly high tax and over regulation will have the opposite effect.

Yep, the UK is just another EU member. This is how international relations work. As for enough, I hope that Brexit would mean enough of us having to hear from people like you, stupidly delusional in their arrogance. You stick with the Mail and company and we will not read them and comment there too, a deal?

The popular policies anti-Conservatives want are not suppported by this rag-bag of 'opposition' forces. For example, nationalisation of the railways (highly popular) is proposed only by a piecemeal dropping of franchises over a decade or more: useless for passengers yet taxes would still go to rail subsidies!; and taking back immediate control without compensation (possible outside EU) or by issuing low-interest rate compensation bonds is not proposed.
Improving the NHS would be financed by borrowing from private providers (very expensve) as in Blairaite 'public/private finance initiative' that costs needless billions, instead of using direct governent bond-issues at current low rates.
The Greens are unlikely to support industrial expansion and cheap abundant local energy, or cuts in regulation-excess, so the decline in economic UK's productivity will continue, making OAP's and adequate pensions for all apppear a relative 'burden' to be cut on an undermined GDP growth' and so extending poverty.
There seem to be no proposals for taking back control of gas, electricity and water supplies etc, leaving vital utilities at the mercy of the current rent-taking owners, mostly abroad.
As to housing, the Labour Party's proposed building programme is pathetically tiny. Green opposition to taking new land (even though the population is crammed into 10% or less of it) will stop proper housing provision. There is no proposal for a correct register of beneficial land ownership either - UK land ownership is very difficult to trace, let alone tax! Nor are the various tax-reforms likely to close 'tax havens' and restore the proportionate contribution of profit-taking to tax revenue; strong taxes on unearned income and idle wealth do not seem to be on the horizon.
The proponents of EU membership have no answer to ending the prevention of Government fiscal activity and the prevention of Fiscal and administrative support for import substitution and economic development that the EU membership prevents. No real possibility of anti-austerity measures the and they would be swamped by economic migrants even if they were attempted. And so on.
So: what effective oppositi0n are voters supposed to be looking to? LibDems who grabbed at power as human sields for the Conservavtives by coalition? and who broke their pledges? and are now perhaps cosying-up to Blair? Radical alternative? What a joke.

Why think that little will change until 2022? Once Brexit takes effect in 2019, all the legal arrangements that structure trade and migration with the EU will lapse. Those cannot be reinstated even by maximum "looking aside" or "general goodwill" from both sides, but only by a negotiated "new relationship" that is legally binding. Giving a "more favoured" interim status to the UK and not to other non-EU members would be a breach of the EU treaty. I doubt that would be possible, even if all the EU-27 were to support it, which is unlikely. Don't bet on such hopes. Prepare for a complete hard Brexit in March 2019.

Wishful thinking combined with heroic assumptions. Who knows what a new batch of Tories will bring - dangerous to think they will be moderates. Selected by militant Leavers is more likely. At 232 M.P.s Labour well exceed ed the Tory nadir of 1997 at 165 seats - nobody talked about the demise of the Tory Party then. He has forgotten though that the elctions boundaroies have been gerrymandered and the HoC has become a part time English parliament which could build in a Tory majority until the end of time - May needed no lessons from Putin or Erdogan!

Pontiffs have it easy. They invent facts, string them together and make an argument. This one falls down on the first hurdle. What drove June 23 2016 is that voters woke up to the fact that their government has abandoned its powers to decide on their behalf. The government never had a mandate to do that; it simply pulled the wool, knowingly, over British eyes. Subertuge begat a constitutional crisis , as more and more laws, regulations, judgements came thundering down the Brussels pipeline without so much as a say so by the British electorate. The result wof June 23 was that the majority of British voters, much larger than the 52% suggests, insisted that their constitution from 1689 be applied. It was emphatically not a conservative or an English nationalist vote. It was not conservative? The largest vote ever for the Conservatives was over 13 million in 1992; June 23 saw a vote of 17.2 million, compared to a Cameron vote of 11.3 million. 6 million extra voted Leave, and they were decidedly NOT Conservative. English nationalism? A complete and utter red herring. It flickers here and there. Labour and "progressives" would love to stoke it. They can then talk for ever about "identity". The identity of the UK is much more robust than that. It is identification with Crown, Parliament, Law Courts, and everything that flows from that.
Don't listen to fraudsters.

An extract of peoples’ commentaries (opinion) on the British GE, shows a very inconvenient truth about T. May. These are some examples:
a) T. May has an attention seeking "look at me" syndrome (e.g. French elections happening in the same time period with e new government in time for June?);
b) T. May is control narcissist; Any credible behavioural or a speech expert would confirm that May is brutal and a demented dictator. She is a cloned copy of Merkel but with inferior intelligence.
c) Dozens of sitting MPs under investigation for electoral fraud stemming from 2015 GE, potentially endangering their mandates. May has currently a very slim majority in parliament and she is an unelected PM;
d) The June 2017 GE have got nothing to do with Brexit, she is already in power and has already triggered Art. 50, so she already has the mandates but she is after absolute autocracy for her to raise taxes at will and wipe out the NHS and any real democratic opposition for years to come;
e) Strike while the iron is hot, and the opposition is being perceived as weak, get rid of Corbyn, the Blairites, the anarchists and any opposition within her own party and in the media, all in one stroke;
f) Abort all UK parliamentary inquiries, committees and reports, especially the inconvenient ones such as the brexit oversight committee. Start a new page, scandal free;
g)May showed how comfortable she was with telling barefaced lies when the right manufactured a pseudo scandal about “health tourists” exploiting the dear old NHS. Pressed by the BBC to say how much money thieving foreigners were stealing from the health service, May could not give an honest reply, for the Royal College of GPs had already explained that the supposed “problem barely existed”;
h) The upcoming opportunity of the Great Repeal Bill is too juicy to pass up, or rather carve up. What is usual to British voters is highly unusual in other democracies. Only in Britain does the Parliament define its own powers, choose its own length of mandate, and the dates of its own elections / Which means in British terms, the governing party, is able to rewrite the rules of representative democracy unheeded by such as Constitutions or 70% Referendums. Parliament in the UK neither serves nation, the people, the electorate nor even the partisan minority which elected the parliamentary majority. It serves only itself. One can only imagine a football team rewriting the rules of the game even as it is playing a match.

Anybody suggesting the Daily Mail, circulation less than 1.5 million, is a reference point is nuts. The Daily Mail is so popular that I am regularly offered a free copy at the local shop because they cannot sell it. An offer I decline. No takers then.

The author assumes there will be a swing to the Labour Party in UK politics. Unfortunately the monoculture of a Blue map looks increasingly likely for a number of reasons not least electoral boundaries. I say unfortunate because a monoculture is not healthy, but then nor is the opposition at the moment or for the foreseeable future. It is pertinent to remember that Blair resorted to the claim he would be a synthetic conservative, a Tory in drag, and stick to the then Conservative financial plan in order to get elected. He then immediately shed his clothes and paraded his gruesome naked ambitions which the UK paid a big price for, a sight no one wants women and children to see again

The forecast of a clash between 'nationalist conservatism and a new outward-looking progressive opposition' is just an Icarus flight of fancy and the author waxing lyrical. Wax which will not last the midday Sun.

UK future opinion of the EU is more likely to be focused on the state of the EU than the state of the UK, an EU which will be subjected to the ever present continental drift of the eurozone teutonic flaws. Would the UK join the EU now if it was not a member. Highly unlikely on popular vote. Why then should there be a debate about leaving being such a sorrow. The sorrow is that the EU is not fit for purpose having been hijacked by a euro Ponzi scam and warped to deal with WW2 PTSD in Central Europe and descended into the subjugation and the disenfranchisement of the youth in the South.In what way can this be acclaimed as achievement. It is raw brutality

Most of Koletsky's diatribe rests on the assumption that he knows the contents of Mrs. May's head better than anyone else - possibly even her, herself!

He compounds this stunning feat by being able to predict the content of the heads of Labour, Lib-Dem and Greens, despite the fact that the majority of Labour voters plumped for Brexit.

No-one knows how it wall pan out and this is what makes it all so interesting. My own view is that the unified facade of 27 members states won't last 27 weeks, once the realities of trade strikes home.